Wonder

Written By R.J. Palacio
Original Publication Date: 2012

Rating: 4 Stars

Favorite Quotes:

"the universe takes care of all its birds."

"Everyone deserves a standing ovation because we all overcometh the world. "

Review:

What do you do when you see someone with a deformity, a missing limb, a physical disorder, or really, anything that's considered "not normal"?  Do you stare?  Do you look away?  Do you glance away and then look back, pretending that everything is "normal" and you're not bothered?   Do you tease and mock?  Do you cringe?  Do you feel badly that you're looking at that person differently?  We all do it.  When we're confronted with a person's appearance that is less-than-average, we panic.  We don't know what to do.  We don't know how to approach that person because we can only assume that their less-than-average appearance makes them a less-than-average kind of person that needs to be treated differently.  It's a twisted part of our human nature.

August (Auggie) Pullman was born with a facial deformity, though that's an understatement of grand proportions.  He's looked at differently every day.  People treat him like a porcelain doll.  People even scream, when startled by his appearance.  He says he's used to it, but can anyone ever really be used to that sort of treatment?

Up until the fifth grade he's been kept out of school.  His mother has homeschooled him because of the multitude of surgeries that he goes through to make his face more functional, firstly, and slightly more average, secondly.  For the fifth grade, he gets sent to Beecher Prep, a private school in the city.

Remember what it's like being the new kid in a new school?  Remember how you looked at the new kid in your school?  Remember how they were treated?  Now imagine going through that every single day for a year, because every time you meet someone new, you are always considered the freak: always.

Wonder is a remarkable story of growth.  The perspective switches between Auggie, his sister, and various other friends of the kids.  The growth can be seen in all the perspectives, by all the kids.  This is not only the story of how one deformed kid is grown to be accepted by his peers, but the story of how a group of kids grows to accept the strange and different in their worlds.

Yaqui Delgado Wants To Kick Your Ass

Written By Meg Medina
Original Publication Date: March 26, 2013

Rating: 5 Stars

Book Notes:

I received this ebook for free from the publisher, via Netgalley.

I've been sitting on this review since February 23rd, I wanted to wait until pub. date for it to go live, and it's been truly making me antsy.

Review:

"Yaqui Delgado wants to kick your ass," is what Piddy Sanchez is told, in the very first line of this moving novel about bullying.  This is news for Piddy, she doesn't even know who Yaqui is.  Turns out, Yaqui thinks that Piddy's stuck up, because of her good grades, lack of "Latina" attitude, and she shakes her butt when she walks. I love this premise because it shows exactly how inane the reasons are for a particular teen to be singled out of the crowd and bullied to, really, the end of their rope.  Bullying is an inanity, I've seen too many books try to give good reasons to the bully for hating those they bully; that's just not how it works.  More often than not it is a ridiculous non-reason that a student is picked out and picked on by her peers.

What I really loved about this book was that while the characters were Latina (and I know I missed things because of that - I really know very little about the Latina culture), they were people first and foremost.  This was not the story of Piddy Sanchez, a Latina girl who was getting bullied for not being Latina enough.  This was the story of Piddy Sanchez, a girl, who was getting bullied because of some ridiculous non-reason.  Piddy's mother was not only "Piddy's Mother," but a woman with a rich and slightly disturbing past, first and foremost. Even the minor characters were richly written; there wasn't a single character that felt incomplete or flat.  I could relate to almost all of the high school students.  

Okay, now that I think of it, Yaqui's cronies were pretty flat, but they were barely characters, simply extensions of the twisted mind that was Yaqui.

Another wonderful thing about the way this book was written is that it expresses the difficulty and confusion that a bullying victim feels when trying to decide what to do.  Sure, we're told over and over again that telling an adult is the correct thing to do, but as teenagers, all we can see is that if we tell an adult we'd be considered a narc or a tattletale and then the bully would probably hate us more.  In fact, not only would that make the one bully hate us more, but it could possibly make the rest of the school hate us as well.  Being a teenager is hard and this book expresses one facet of that, beautifully.

The chapter when all the threats come to a head, and there is a fight, is painful to read.  I needed to put the book down after reading it.  The humiliation and fear and desperate desire to forget it ever happened were so real.  While, my bullies never made it to actually beating the shit out of me, it was something I lived in fear of for a good portion of my middle school career.  Piddy's thought processes and actions throughout the entire book were so real.  I can't help but wonder if Meg Medina went through something similar in high school, herself.  We all have our horror stories from that part of our lives, in one way or another.

Honestly, I'd love to see this become a required reading book for high school or middle school English classes.  There needs to be an update on some of the novels that we have our children reading about bullying, because some of them are so out-dated that they're down right unrelatable.  This tale is horrific and completely relatable and modern.

The Perks of Being A Wallflower

Written by Stephen Chbosky
Original Publication Date: 1999

Rating: 2 Stars Out Of 5

Review:
There's a certain kind of “coming of age” novel that I simply cannot relate to.  Books like The Catcher in the Rye, Hairstyles of the Damned, and this one.  I'm not sure what differentiates these books from other coming of age stories – I read a fuckload of YA, and 90% of those are coming of age stories.  It has something to do with the “I'm so gifted and weird and punk and cannot communicate with other people so I'm not going to try,” stream of consciousness.  At least I think that's it.  Believe me, I was a weirdo in high school.  I was the wallflower that saw everything and only rarely spoke of it.  I read everything I could get my hands on.  But for some reason these books don't resonate, even a little bit.  They read like bullshit or pretentious fantasy to me.  I don't understand what is so special about those novels.  Maybe I'm just too old for this kind of coming of age story, and when I was the right age, I was too busy coming of age myself, to appreciate them.

What I Disliked About This Book
No fifteen year old boy talks like this, even in writing.  The writing style is that of a seven year old boy.  I think it would have done better if the narrator were in 7th grade, and his friends were all going away to high school at the end of the novel.  A middle school student with that level of writing skill is far more believable.

Even with a learning disability, some form of autism, a trauma, etc. I felt he was too much a weird mishmosh of youth and self-awareness.  Children with autism and learning disabilities think differently, not just younger - it's why I find the brain of those with autism and various other quirks so fascinating.

His ignorance of sex is monumentally ridiculous.  Just because he's gone through a lot and may or may not have some sort of mental special need, doesn't mean he'd be that unaware of himself.  I worked at a camp for kids with special needs, we had to have 'masturbation stations' for kids that had hit puberty, because what kids do understand is that when they do something that feels good, they should keep doing it.

I had the “twist” ending of the novel figured out in the first 50 pages or so.  On top of that, the last 30 pages of a 230 page book were dedicated to spelling out the twist.  I feel like I was bashed over the head a few times with a dictionary, in order to get the “twist” to sink in.  I thought Life of Pi bashed me over the head with its ending; this felt way worse.

What My Inner English Major Thinks
Charlie's maturity level, along with his understanding of sex, froze at the age of 7 when his Aunt Helen died in a car accident.  He wasn't able to move beyond the screwiness of the first 7 years of his life.  That was the first time he was in a mental hospital and his grief and pain froze his maturity level.  It makes the style in which this book was written make a lot more sense.  It was more of a regression than a disorder.

What I Liked About This Book
There was a reason, no matter how thin, for Charlie's maturity level.

The fact that he read a lot, in order to escape the real world.  I was able to relate to this well.  I was very good at disappearing into books when I was a kid.

Sam and Patrick.  They seemed a lot less cookie-cutter than all of Charlies other friends.  There's a formula for the weird kid's friends and most of Charlie's friends sat right on that line.

The drug usage.  As weird as it sounds, I really liked the way that Charlie expressed himself when he was high or on LSD – even though it was a bad trip.

Something That Drove Me A Little Crazy
He obviously disliked abbreviations, such as MASH or e.e. Cummings, but for some reason he was constantly abbreviating “girlfriend” to “girlfr.”  I liked the touch that he didn't enjoy abbreviations, but the “girlfr” thing made me rage.  Charlie didn't strike me as a character that would have liked any kind of textspeak, even his own created textspeak.

Long Story Short
I don't understand what makes this book so special.  However, I believe that the movie may be worth seeing.  I can see most of my annoyances becoming part of the background when it is on film rather than on paper.

I had a hard time picking a rating for this novel, in the end I went with two stars, but it could have been one or three just as easily.